University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Projects & Workshops Special Collections 1991 Biocritical Essay (Clark Blaise) Ross, Catherince Sheldrick University of Calgary Press The Clark Blaise papers : first accession and second accession. (Canadian archival inventory series, no. 9). - Calgary : University of Calgary Press, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/43976 Essay Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/SpecColl/blaisbioc.htm Special Collections Clark Blaise Biocritical Essay by Catherine Sheldrick Ross ©1991 Reproduced with permission Clark Blaise is a master of a form on the border of autobiography and fiction--what he calls "'personal' fiction".1 When you read the first six published books, what is striking is the extent to which they all seem to be part of one larger, ongoing work. Ranging in form from short stories and novellas to novels and a travel memoir, these works create a unified Blaisian world. At the centre of each fiction is a perceiving self, engaged in remembering, inventing, imagining, and presenting the conditions of his own existence. Blaise's own life supplies many of the raw materials of place and incident, but remembered situations are transformed and reshaped anew from one story to the next.2 Typically the stories are told in the first person by a male narrator who looks back on significant events of his life, trying to make sense of things. This narrator is always an outsider, partly because his Canadian parents are never quite assimilated into American life. However, the most significant fact about the parents is their difference from each other. They represent the antipodes of the son's imagination. The triangle formed by the perceiving me-character and his parents is a recurring design element in this ongoing Blaisian work. But what is the reader's experience of reading a Clark Blaise fiction? In Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, readers talk about the kinds of book they would like to read--for example, "The novels that I prefer...are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page"--and the very next chapter is the opening chapter of just that sort of fiction. What sort of description would call forth a Clark Blaise book? Perhaps "The book I'm looking for is one that creates the texture of a life poised on the lip of a volcano" or "The books that interest me present a self constantly re-inventing himself out of the givens of his own experience". The givens cannot stand on their own, of course. Take the most incontrovertible facts of a life: time and place of birth. "I was born in Fargo, North Dakota, in 1940" is the first sentence of the autobiographical fragment "Memories of Unhousement" in Resident Alien.3 The flat understatedness of this beginning suggests an http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/SpecColl/blaisbioc.htm (1 of 14)10/25/2006 9:40:56 AM http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/SpecColl/blaisbioc.htm unselfconscious assertion of identity and belonging.4 However, it soon becomes apparent that Blaise is never unselfconscious: sentences that sound casual are the result of deliberate craft. Identity, in particular, cannot be taken for granted but must be strenuously achieved, as Blaise suggested in an interview with Geoff Hancock: Anyone who led a life as tenuous as I did, fraught with almost daily evidence of evanescence, is obviously going to be concerned with establishing a place and a name and an identity for himself that he could not have established in life. I did not ever have a sense of place, or belonging, in my life. So I had to create it, fabricate it, in my art. That's why my stories and novels have such a strong genealogical impulse. I don't think I have ever written anything in which I did not in some way say, "I was born in this place or that place." Or, "My mother or father or grandparents were born in this place." This is all a kind of fraud. I was born in a town that I've never seen. I moved from Fargo, North Dakota, when I was six months old, and I've never been back.5 Blaise has to date published two collections of short stories, A North American Education (1973) and Tribal Justice (1974); two novels, Lunar Attractions (1979) and Lusts (1983); one autobiographical travel memoir, Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977); one book in which short stories are sandwiched between autobiographical fragments, Resident Alien (1986); and one work of journalism, The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987). With the exception of this last book, the entire body of work is concerned initially with finding or inventing an identity and later with deconstructing an identity. Again and again, Blaise goes back to the essential experiences of his life and rearticulates them, reshapes them, dreams them over again. Reading the fictions and the autobiography, we are confronted by a sensibility preoccupied with interpretation. Blaise has taken on the hermeneut's task of penetrating the surface of things and revealing the secret, concealed meanings. "A writer", Blaise has told Hancock in an interview, "is always trying to suggest the other side of things".6 And later in the same interview, "[My] stories...tend towards a kind of confirmation and towards the discovery of that which you wanted to keep hidden, and to a kind of confirmation of what you hoped was not true".7 In the Blaisian world, events seem random and lives are subject to chance episodes of pain and violence. As Blaise put it in an interview with me in November 1988, I want to write a fiction which is sufficiently broad to contain random, chaotic, accidental qualities. There's nothing more moving in fiction to me than the sense of an authentic randomness. I want to create a fiction that is sufficiently broad so that it can contain the notion of all of the accidents and contradictability that is part of life itself.8 But the typical Blaisian persona is driven to interpret--to find the hidden meaning in what seems like randomness, to push toward some terrifying peripeteia. The first accident to be interpreted has to do with the mystery of birth and of origins, the theme of many of his stories. The "only Canadian writer born in Fargo, North Dakota" (RA 165), Blaise has explored the http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/SpecColl/blaisbioc.htm (2 of 14)10/25/2006 9:40:56 AM http://www.ucalgary.ca/lib-old/SpecColl/blaisbioc.htm significance of his "accidental placement inside an emblematically Canadian family" (RA 175). A recurrent episode in the stories and novels is the character who has a sense in early adolescence that his identity has been tampered with in some profound way when he discovers that his family name is not what he had always supposed: not T. B. Doe but Thibidault in "The Thibidault Stories" in A North American Education; not Desjardins but Gardner in "The March" in Tribal Justice; not Porter but Carrier in Resident Alien. And, we might add, not Blaise but Blais. A related mystery is his parents' apparently incongruous relationship. Blaise's French-Canadian father, Leo Romeo Blais/Blaise--furniture salesman and long distance traveller--was handsome, extroverted, charming, and untrustworthy. Described in Resident Alien as one of the "dark, self-destructive, violent sociopaths" (p.27), this father is the prototype for the fictional fathers in Blaise's stories, the tattoed ex-boxers and wrestlers who like sexy women and flashy cars. The father represents glamorous, untamed potency. Says Blaise, "it was a legacy I wanted to claim. Myself as gipsy, as criminal, outcast" (RA 39). In contrast, Anne Marion Vanstone, his upright, resolute English-Canadian mother from Wawanesa, Manitoba, was one of the "bright, confident, assertive, informed people" (RA 27). The daughter of a man of substance--a prairie doctor who later became the driving force behind an insurance company in Western Canada--she graduated in 1927 in art from Wesley College (now the University of Winnipeg), taught school in various prairie towns, and in the early 30's became a student of design at the Bauhaus. "To me it's an extraordinary thought", said Blaise, "that she was this girl from prairie Canada in the midst of the Bauhaus studying interior design with high functional modernism".9 Fleeing Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power, she went to Prague, then to London, and then home to Canada in 1937. Called back to Montreal to be head decorator at Eaton's, she met Leo Blais, furniture salesman on the floor. This was the accidental encounter that transformed her life and set up the tortured relationship examined in many of Blaise's fictions. Interpreting his own life much as one would a literary text, Blaise looks for the one event that gives meaning and structure to the whole. He finds it in his parents' divorce when he was nineteen. This event is also offered as a key to interpreting the stories. It accounts, he says, for the continued presence of child and adolescent characters in the fictions: "I am dependent on a world made explicable by my mismatched parents in their desperate marriage. So long as they are together, all things are possible....I write from an undisclosed adult perspective at a point in time after their break-up, looking back to a time before it happened, when the potential for divorce, the logic for divorce, the imperative for divorce, was temporarily set aside" (RA 12).